Jennifer Locke’s Passing Through is a two-channel video installation, projected on opposing walls of the gallery, exploring the body as a sculptural object in relationship to architectural space and the material power-dynamics that organize and sustain lived experience.
At the outset of the video, one side of the installation shows the minimalist, neutral plane of a white wall, while the other shows the wooden studs and unpainted drywall on the other side. The artist enters the frame with the white wall and begins hitting it repeatedly with a hammer, bridging the two sides of the installation, and ultimately busting a hole in the wall big enough for her to climb through to the other side.
The piece is a study in embodied phenomenology, exploring how the artist’s physical intervention in the architectural space affects her and the viewer’s respective positions. She follows strict instructions, working within the boundaries of clearly defined limits, and distilling experience to a basic set of parameters. She highlights the embodied nature of seeing and the play of presence and absence in the constitution of experience. Withdrawing from one frame and emerging in the other, she performs the fort-da of coming to be and passing away, juxtaposing foreground and background and highlighting the material structures underlying architectural space.
Indeed, drawing on her experience as a dominatrix, jiu-jitsu wrestler, and artist model, Locke presents the visual field as the result of a power struggle, between the embodied subject and the boundaries of architectural space, rife with blood, sweat, and tears. The piece is violent and intense. She presents architecture and spectatorship as forms of disciplining the body, positioning the subject in space and directing her view. She collides with the walls around her, fighting against the boundaries of her very sense of self. Struggling to re-position herself in the world, to disrupt and even ultimately to transcend her surroundings.
